“You’re going to be flying solo. You okay with that?” — Sergeant Early

Detective Nan Vining is used to being in situations where she has to fly solo. Both professionally as an investigator with the Pasadena Police Department and as a single mother raising a teenage daughter, Vining has reached a point where she’s learned to trust her instincts and go where they take her.

Ashley (Ash) McKenna is a man molded and driven by ideas. As a boy growing up on Staten Island, Ash would sit with his firefighter father in the wee hours of the night listening to the emergency scanner, his dad patiently explaining to him what all the mysterious calls and codes meant.

“He made us all victims,” one caller said. “It was a hate crime of the worst kind, the hate was for us all, for society.”

As the city of San Francisco gets ready to direct some good-natured hate against their loathed baseball rival Dodgers during a three-game series with their beloved Giants, a different kind of hate is stalking the city’s Mission District.

“Don’t lie to me. I am your final judgment here. I am your final chance for salvation.” —The Rider

The setting: late eighteenth century. The players: three men moving through a violent and unforgiving world, two looking for earthly revenge, one the self-appointed hand of God. The stakes: a quest to understand man’s place in the world and how the power of belief—and a single act or decision—can set the course of one’s life.

“You can afford to burn with a self-righteous purpose and champion Truth and Justice because you can’t admit just how terrifyingly little either of them has to do with anyone’s life, including your own.” — Raymond Locke

On the street it’s reflex. Kill or be killed. This is methodical. Cold blooded. There’s not many men or women up to the task. — Jake Denton

Jake Denton is a member of the Cameron County Sheriff’s Department. Most days his job entails the things most people associate with being a police officer: going to roll call and briefings, patrolling his assigned beat, trying his best to make sure he and the people he is sworn to serve and protect all go home safely at the end of his shift.

“May the fires of Hell rise up to consume this place.” — Rebecca Bradford

Those words, the last uttered by a young Pennsylvania woman accused of witchcraft and killed in 1692, seem to have come back to haunt the current residents of Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, when Police Chief Kat Campbell is roused from her fitful sleep in the wee hours of Devil’s Night by the sound of sirens…a lot of them.